Digital Journalism

ISSN: 2167-0811 (Print) 2167-082X (Online) Journal homepage: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rdij20

Quantified Audiences in News Production

Rodrigo Zamith

To cite this article: Rodrigo Zamith (2018) Quantified Audiences in News Production, Digital
Journalism, 6:4, 418-435, DOI: 10.1080/21670811.2018.1444999

To link to this article: https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1444999

Published online: 06 Mar 2018.

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 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS
PRODUCTION
A synthesis and research agenda

Rodrigo Zamith

A number of social, technological, and economic shifts over the past two decades have led to
the proliferation of audience analytics and metrics in journalism. This article contends that we
are witnessing a third wave toward the rationalization of audience understanding and distin-
guishes between audience analytics (systems that capture information) and audience metrics
(quantified measures output by those systems). The body of literature on analytics and metrics
in the context of news production is then synthesized across the ABCDE of news production:
attitudes, behaviors, content, discourse, and ethics. That synthesis leads to an overarching con-
clusion that while contemporary journalism is not being driven by quantified audiences, both
audiences and quantification are playing far more prominent roles in news production than in
the past. Scholars and practitioners have also become less pessimistic about analytics and
metrics over time, recognizing more nuanced effects and prosocial possibilities. Finally, impor-
tant gaps in the literature are identified and new research directions proposed to help address
them.

KEYWORDS metrics; analytics; audiences; news production; ethics; participatory journalism

There has been a movement in media industries over the past 90 years toward
ever-greater rationalization of audience understanding, or the use of scientific methods
to construct audiences based on data (Napoli 2011). This movement has manifested
itself most recently in the proliferation of audience analytics, systems that capture a
range of audience behaviors, and audience metrics, quantified measures from which
preferences are inferred. Scholars have taken great interest in these developments
within the context of journalism, with some arguing that it may lead to “a fundamental
transformation … in journalists’ understanding of their audiences” and perhaps ulti-
mately toward a journalism driven by the “agenda of the audience” (Anderson 2011b,
529). That shift may also lead to greater emphasis on personalized news experiences
that focus on individuals rather than communities (Anderson 2011a), posing challenges
to the development of common knowledge and publics (Tandoc and Thomas 2015);
changes to the authoritative and jurisdictional claims journalists are able to make (Lewis
and Westlund 2015b); and to the reworking of boundaries that are fundamental to the
self-understanding of professional journalism (Coddington 2015). However, scholars
have long observed that the availability of a technology does not mandate its use
(Pinch and Bijker 1984). Affordances must be analyzed in their social, historical, and
economic contexts in order to understand the diffusion, acceptance, and use of a

Digital Journalism, 2018

Vol. 6, No. 4, 418–435, https://doi.org/10.1080/21670811.2018.1444999
Ó 2018 Informa UK Limited, trading as Taylor & Francis Group
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 419

technology, which may then be used in myriad ways (Siles and Boczkowski 2012). While
the potential for transformation is considerable, scholars are still disentangling the
impacts audience analytics and metrics are having on contemporary news production.
The aim of this article is to situate the increasing quantification of audiences
within broader theoretical and historical contexts, synthesize the scholarship on audi-
ence analytics and audience metrics, and highlight areas for further development in that
stream of work. It is argued that we are witnessing a third wave toward the rationaliza-
tion of audience understanding that is both distinct and in some ways a continuation of
pushes in the 1930s and 1970s to use scientific methods and technological innovations
to better quantify audience preferences and behaviors. Audience analytics are ubiqui-
tous in today’s newsrooms, with many utilizing multiple systems. While contemporary
journalism does not appear to be driven by audience metrics, they are now factored to
some extent into journalistic attitudes, behaviors, content, discourses, and ethics. Follow-
ing an initial period of skepticism and pessimism, there is now growing optimism about
and acceptance of metrics among both practitioners and scholars. However, a number
of critical questions remain unanswered within this stream of work.
The article begins by explaining the notion of constructed audiences, historicizing
the construction of audiences by media companies, describing the potential that audi-
ence analytics and metrics offer for transforming those constructions, and situating the
rapid proliferation of those systems and measures within social and economic develop-
ments. The budding scholarship on this phenomenon is then distilled to outline the
impacts of quantified audiences on the ABCDE of news production: attitudes, behaviors,
content, discourses, and ethics. Finally, that stream of work is evaluated and critical
questions that remain unanswered are highlighted.

Toward Quantified Audience Constructions

A long line of scholarly work has examined audiences as socially constructed enti-
ties. A constructed audience refers to the “images” (Gans 1979) and “abstractions” (Sch-
lesinger 1978) developed by media producers of the individuals that make up an
audience. These interpretations emerge in the minds of newsworkers through exposure
to different inputs over the course of day-to-day activity. It is important to distinguish
between constructed and actual audiences because the former may reflect the latter
poorly, such as in terms of size, make-up, interests, and information needs. Indeed,
newsworkers long depended on letters to the editor and interactions with their imme-
diate peers and friends as primary inputs for their construction of the audience, yield-
ing abstractions that were only marginally reflective of those who consumed their work
(DeWerth-Pallmeyer 1997; Gans 1979).
Crucially, a social constructivist perspective and social psychological theories like
the Theory of Planned Behavior contend that individuals can only make decisions based
on their perceptions of phenomena. For journalists, many of those perceptions stem
from their tacit professional knowledge, which they do not actively think about during
their work and have trouble easily articulating (DeWerth-Pallmeyer 1997). Constructed
audiences, in particular, inform decision-making at multiple levels, from calculations of
newsworthiness (Wallace 2017) and noteworthiness (Napoli 2011) to organizational
strategy (Turow 2005).
420 R. ZAMITH

Constructed audiences are therefore capable of influencing both conscious and

subconscious decisions. It is thus important to ascertain how such images come to be
and how the process of abstraction has changed over the past several decades to
emphasize quantification.

Modern Rationalization of Audience Understanding

According to Napoli (2011), there are two interrelated processes that drive
changes to the rationalization of audience understanding, or the use and refinement of
empirical, typically quantitative techniques to aid the understanding of multiple dimen-
sions of audience behavior in order to better predict and respond to those behaviors.
The first involves technological changes that alter the dynamics of media consumption.
The second involves technological changes that facilitate the gathering of new forms of
information about the media audience. To these, one should add social and economic
changes that alter conceptualizations of and discourses around audiences as well as
the imperatives for serving and monetizing them (Anderson 2011b; Turow 2005).
Napoli (2011) observes that media industries’ perceptions of their audience
became increasingly scientific and data-driven over the course of the twentieth century.
Two waves of audience measurement developed during that time. The first began in
the 1930s when media organizations started moving away from a then-dominant “intu-
itive model” whereby decisions were made based on “subjective, often instinctive, judg-
ments … regarding audience tastes, preferences, and reactions” (p. 32). Economic
hardships drove advertisers to demand “tangible” evidence of effectiveness and news
organizations began collecting data on their readers’ demographic and behavioral char-
acteristics using scientific methods like systematic reader surveys. A second wave
emerged in the 1970s as computers facilitated the collection and analysis of larger
quantities of statistical data, news consultants were brought in to help attract larger
audiences, and managers sought additional quantitative data to help them make more
“scientific” managerial decisions (Napoli 2011).
This history underscores the fact that neither audience measurement nor the
growing inclination to incorporate audience feedback into editorial decision-making are
novel phenomena. As Nadler (2016) argues, the popular perception that digital journal-
ism “represents a historical rupture” (p. 2) vis-à-vis the desire to let users’ preferences
set the agenda of news organizations is misguided. The first wave occurred during
journalism’s “high modernism” period, when it was dominated by a culture of profes-
sionalism and driven by the conviction that journalism’s primary function was to serve
society by focusing on “objective” information about public affairs (Hallin 1992). As
such, important cultural and institutional barriers that emphasized professional auton-
omy restricted the impact of the newly collected audience information on editorial
activities. In contrast, the second wave during the 1970s was part of (and helped drive)
a paradigmatic shift in the field away from the ideal of professional autonomy and into
a “postprofessional” period marked by greater institutional acceptance of the idea that
consumers’ preferences should factor into news production (Nadler 2016). Unlike its
predecessor, the second wave took place during a period of perceived economic inse-
curity among news companies—though they largely remained high-profit enterprises—
and mounting pressures for increased revenues, which led to managerial pushes
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 421

toward more market-driven journalism (DeWerth-Pallmeyer 1997). There was, therefore,

greater incorporation of systematically collected audience feedback into editorial deci-
sion-making than in the past, though frontline newsworkers (e.g. lower-level editors
and journalists) at many organizations continued to largely reject it (Gans 1979).
While the “postprofessional” period has indeed extended to the digital age
(Nadler 2016), the media environment began to see notable technological, economic,
and social transformations in the early 2000s that have culminated in a third wave
toward the rationalization of audience understanding. This wave is characterized by
the development and rapid proliferation of low-cost, automated systems that can cap-
ture, link, and organize large amounts digital trace data that reflect non-purposive
feedback from all consumers of digital media products (Mullarkey 2004). It is also char-
acterized by new discourses around the term “audience,” namely in terms of its role
within news production and how it is articulated through a range of quantifiable
measures (Anderson 2011a). This wave is partly a product of economic upheaval in the
industry (Lowrey and Gade 2011) as well as the changing nature of professionalism
within the field (Meyers and Davidson 2016) and the “big data” phenomenon that
extends beyond it (Lewis and Westlund 2015b). Finally, this wave has introduced
real-time audience feedback to a far larger range of actors and activities within news
production than its predecessors.
With regard to the first of Napoli’s (2011) two interrelated processes, it is impor-
tant to note that the contemporary media environment is distinguished by fragmenta-
tion and audience autonomy. There is presently a large and growing array of content
delivery platforms, resulting in the disaggregation of content and the diffusion of audi-
ence attention (Napoli 2011). Audiences now have considerably more control over how
they consume media and can produce their own content at marginal costs, giving
them greater autonomy and more choices (Bruns 2008). These shifts have created sig-
nificant challenges for traditional audience information systems—the “data gathering
and feedback mechanisms used … to measure audience exposure to media content …
predict content preferences … target content … and gather information on audiences’
reactions” (Napoli 2011, 10)—since they struggle to capture such dispersed and
empowered audiences.

Audience Analytics and Metrics

Central to this third wave are audience analytics. Though the term is sometimes
used interchangeably with audience metrics in the scholarly literature, there is value in
distinguishing between them. Audience analytics refer to the systems and software that
enable the measurement, collection, analysis, and reporting of digital data pertaining to
how content is consumed and interacted with (see also Braun 2014).1 They include the
algorithms that log data requests and capture a range of user actions (e.g. how far they
scrolled down a page), aggregate data to highlight patterns or make recommendations
(e.g. trending stories), and present information about an audience via an intuitive inter-
face (e.g. online dashboard). There are several such systems—Chartbeat, Google Analyt-
ics, and Parse.ly are among the most common today—and they are often used in
conjunction with one another (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). They are sometimes sup-
plemented with a custom-built system specific to the news organization or developed
422 R. ZAMITH

by a parent company. Unlike previous audience information systems, audience analytics

do away with the need to sample and capture information that may be omitted from
self-reports, making it “possible to record data about individual consumers at an
unprecedented level of detail” (Mullarkey 2004, 42).
Audience metrics refer to the quantified and aggregated measures of audience
preferences and behaviors generated by those data collection and processing systems
(see also Zamith 2016). Nguyen (2013) notes that there are two distinct sets of metrics:
internal and external. Internal metrics include data about how a site or app is utilized
by users during their visit, including data about traffic to and from the organization
(e.g. number of unique visitors) and about user behaviors (e.g. number of times the
share button is clicked). External metrics consist of information about preferences and
behaviors occurring on other platforms (e.g. trending keywords on Twitter).
The distinction between systems (analytics) and output (metrics) helps separate
the artifactual nature of a technology and the textual nature of its content (see Siles
and Boczkowski 2012). A single analytics system may output multiple metrics. The same
metric may be captured and analyzed by multiple systems (sometimes under different
labels). The meanings associated with a metric can change even as the system that pro-
duced it remains stable, and vice versa. Furthermore, metrics can come to carry mean-
ings that are very different from what the creators of the analytics that enable them
imagined (see Orlikowski 2000; Pinch and Bijker 1984).
While different systems may focus on some of the same metrics, they employ dif-
ferent algorithms to collect, synthesize, and present that information. Two systems
may—and often do (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016)—provide different information about
the same phenomenon (e.g. trending stories). For example, an “engagement” metric
may be operationalized differently across systems even as they use the same label. Dif-
ferent systems may thus generate and present very different abstractions of audiences
to newsworkers, which in turn shape distinct constructions in the newsworkers’ minds.
The disconnect can confuse newsworkers (Graves and Kelly 2010) and lead them to
source particular measures from particular systems with limited regard for the conse-
quences.
In combination, audience analytics and audience metrics offer the potential to
dramatically alter editorial newsworkers’ constructions of audiences by introducing
powerful new inputs. They offer a real-time look at an array of information about indi-
vidual actions and population-wide (in a sampling sense) behavioral patterns that
sometimes challenges the “gut feelings” journalists draw upon (DeWerth-Pallmeyer
1997; Hanusch and Tandoc 2017). The mythology surrounding “unbiased” data and the
“science” of algorithms has also led many practitioners to believe that audience analyt-
ics can narrow gaps between constructed and actual audiences (Cherubini and Nielsen
2016; MacGregor 2007). However, it is important to note that audience analytics gener-
ally capture select behavioral data, from which beliefs and attitudes can only be
inferred. While those systems offer more granular data for certain behavioral phenom-
ena, they may (and often do) offer less data about what audiences are thinking than
prior audience information systems. They can also be used strategically to promote
audience constructions that advance different (e.g. economic) self-interests (Turow
2005). Quantified audiences are therefore still abstractions—ones that emphasize
behavioral choices that may be misinterpreted (if not manipulated) when attempting to
serve community information needs and the public interest more broadly.
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 423

A Changing News Environment

The emergence of a third wave toward the rationalization of audience under-
standing, and the proliferation of audience analytics and metrics in particular, was not
a natural consequence of technological developments. As with previous waves, it was
also shaped by economic and social changes. Theories of organizational change and
professionalism prove helpful for making sense of those changes and highlighting the
potential impact of that proliferation on contemporary news production processes.
The news industry in the United States—and elsewhere—was subjected to dis-
ruptive environmental changes during the past two decades. For example, newspapers
generally suffered precipitous drops in circulation and advertising revenues, and organi-
zations in other sectors struggled to offset similar losses with revenue from digital
products (Coddington 2015). A litany of new players—including platform providers that
do not view themselves as news organizations—drastically increased competition for
audience attention (Napoli 2011). Those shifts upended the industry’s dominant eco-
nomic models, producing a climate of uncertainty and anxiety (Lowrey and Gade 2011).
While some parallels may be drawn to the previous wave during the 1970s (see Nadler
2016), the economic environment around the time of the 2008 “Great Recession” was
considerably direr for most news organizations.
One response to challenging environmental changes is to pursue goal-oriented
optimization and strategies that maximize efficiency. Transaction cost economics, for
example, would encourage the intra- and extra-organizational merging of resources to
reduce uncertainty and costs (Wildman 2006). Similarly, reconfiguration theory would
recommend an organization reconfigure its resources and processes to overcome
uncertainty and ensure optimal operational efficiency (Meyer, Tsui, and Hinings 1993).
These perspectives indicate that a rational response to the turbulence in the industry
would be for news organizations to engage in greater organizational integration, or the
tight coupling of its autonomous units (Lowrey and Woo 2010). In particular, knowl-
edge (e.g. about an organization’s audience) may be more freely shared, and thus bet-
ter exploited, in tightly coupled organizations.
Many news organizations have done just that over the past two decades. For
example, the metaphorical “wall” separating editorial and business staffs is increasingly
seen as a “curtain” in many sectors as those staffs exchange knowledge more liberally
(Coddington 2015). Cross-functional teams that bring together members of previously
distinct autonomous units within an organization have also proliferated (Lewis and
Westlund 2015b; Lowrey and Woo 2010). These integrations have been compelled in
large part by managerial desires to reduce inefficiencies and better exploit audience
data in order to reduce uncertainty about—and meet—audience demand in order to
stay in business (Nadler 2016).
However, journalism is generally viewed as being more than an economic enter-
prise. Although journalism began a shift away from its “high modernism” period during
the 1970s (Hallin 1992), civic-minded ideals and an adherence to a set of institutions
favoring autonomy and control over information remained important to its identity
(Lowrey and Gade 2011). This limited the impact of audience information systems on
day-to-day newswork by frontline actors like lower-level editors and journalists. How-
ever, as sociologists have argued, environmental changes may introduce new jurisdic-
tional disputes and value displacement, requiring actors within a domain to revisit their
424 R. ZAMITH

forged identities and relationships with their work (Lepisto, Crosina, and Pratt 2015).
Journalism responded to “the news media crisis” (p. 422) of the past two decades by
de-professionalizing in some ways and re-professionalizing in others, such as by adopt-
ing entrepreneurial values and redefining its relationship with audiences (Meyers and
Davidson 2016). Moreover, many journalists—under the shroud of voluntary buyouts
and involuntary downsizing—became more concerned with their jobs than their jour-
nalistic values (Bunce 2017). Finally, a “big data” phenomenon that fetishized quantita-
tive data and pitched the analysis of massive data-sets as the solution to myriad
problems began to influence a number of industries, including journalism, during this
time (Lewis and Westlund 2015b).
In short, there are greater incentives and fewer barriers than in previous times for
utilizing the technological affordances of audience analytics to realize a move toward
an “agenda of the audience” (Anderson 2011b, 529). While that move may be argued
to have begun in the 1970s (if not earlier, see Nadler 2016), the contemporary techno-
logical, economic, and social conditions make the leap to situating audiences at the
center of newswork far more likely. That would demand a marked change to traditional
conceptualizations of news production, wherein audiences played a comparably limited
role in setting the agenda (Wallace 2017; Zamith 2016).

Analytics and Metrics in Contemporary News Production

The proliferation of audience analytics has forced scholars to reassess how edito-
rial newsworkers construct and factor their audiences into news production (Lee and
Tandoc 2017). The rapidly growing body of work examining that juncture has
employed a range of theoretical lenses, including coupling and isomorphism (Lowrey
and Woo 2010), diffusion of innovation (Groves and Brown 2011), field theory (Bunce
2017), gatekeeping (Tandoc 2014), institutionalism (Welbers et al. 2016), planned behav-
ior (Tandoc and Ferrucci 2017), social construction of technology (Usher 2013), and
structural pluralism (McKenzie et al. 2011). Additionally, multiple methods have been
used, including content analysis (Zamith 2016), in-depth interviews (MacGregor 2007),
ethnography (Anderson 2011b), and surveys (Hanusch and Tandoc 2017). This theoreti-
cal and methodological pluralism underscores that audience analytics are more than
artifacts with certain material properties that naturally produce some outcome. They
are shaped by the social and economic contexts they operate within and are part of
larger, interrelated sociotechnical systems that enable and constrain (and promote and
discourage) particular practices and beliefs (Lewis and Westlund 2015a; Pinch and Bijker
1984). Moreover, audience analytics may be repeatedly experienced in different ways
by different individuals and thus become reconstituted over time (see Orlikowski 2000).
While it is clear from the literature that the majority of newsrooms today employ
audience analytics and regularly monitor metrics at some level (Cherubini and Nielsen
2016), it is less clear what kind and how much impact those systems and measures are
having on journalists’ attitudes and behaviors, the content they produce, and the domi-
nant discourses and ethical values that mark the field of journalism. The following sub-
sections thus distill the empirical evidence to outline the impacts of quantified
audiences on the ABCDE of news production, highlight the ways in which audience
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 425

analytics and metrics are being socially constructed, and examine how those impacts
and constructions vary across contexts and change over time.

Attitudes
It is apparent that most journalists greeted audience analytics with skepticism if
not disdain. For example, MacGregor (2007) found that although some journalists
embraced analytics, most viewed it as an inadequate means for informing journalists, a
threat to their autonomy, and an affront to their public-service mission. This suggests
that some “high modernist” values (see Hallin 1992) continue to be important, even if
they are becoming less constraining. However, the literature also appears to indicate a
trend toward more positive attitudes over time. Newsworkers may thus be in the pro-
cess of normalizing the technology, recognizing that it is becoming a feature of journal-
ism and that it can be integrated into their workflow—and perhaps to a good end
(Cherubini and Nielsen 2016).
This transition is illustrated by the parallel work of Groves and Brown (2011) and
Usher (2012), who analyzed the Christian Science Monitor’s digital-first transition. Their
fieldwork showed how journalists initially feared that an emerging click-driven culture
would undermine their journalistic values, reduce the control they had over their work,
and alter their workflow and routines. Usher (2012) observed that journalists became
demoralized by the emergent culture—they wanted to resist metrics but understood
that their success was largely measured by it. Groves and Brown (2011) found the ten-
sion had started to resolve itself within a couple of years, with most of the staff adapt-
ing their routines and becoming less skeptical of analytics.
Although scholars continue to find pockets of journalistic resistance to metrics
(e.g. Bunce 2017), recent scholarship has found increasingly positive attitudes. Hanusch
(2017) found that newsworkers’ perceptions of analytics were “surprisingly positive
across editorial hierarchies, suggesting an openness toward more audience-guided
news decisions” (p. 1579). Hanusch argued that this was partly driven by a growing
desire among journalists to make news more relevant to their audiences. Cherubini and
Nielsen (2016) argue that there has been a shift from resistance to curiosity to interest,
with the majority of the journalists they interviewed wanting to make better use of
analytics to “reach their target audiences and do better journalism” (p. 7). This is consis-
tent with the value displacement that is expected from environmental changes in the
industry (Lepisto, Crosina, and Pratt 2015), with journalists revisiting ideas about rela-
tionships with audiences.
Scholars have also found important affective responses to the availability of met-
rics. Ferrer-Conill (2017) observed that journalists at Bleacher Report viewed metrics pos-
itively and as a source of motivation, providing them with constant and instant
feedback on their performance. Usher (2013) found that journalists at Al Jazeera English
wanted greater access to metrics because it was a source of validation and “moral
uplift” (p. 346). While Petre (2015) observed that metrics served as a source of reassur-
ance, they were also viewed as a major source of stress due to their unpredictable and
relentless nature. The content produced by analytics is thus separated from the tech-
nology and constructed in different ways to serve the particular needs of the individual,
while introducing unintended challenges (see Siles and Boczkowski 2012).
426 R. ZAMITH

Additionally, scholars have begun to study the impact that audience metrics are
having on journalistic role conceptions. Hanusch and Tandoc (2017) found that Aus-
tralian journalists believe that a consumer orientation is becoming increasingly impor-
tant (compared to a citizen orientation). They also found that a higher perception of
the effectiveness of audience analytics in informing them about their audience was
related to the increase in perceptions of the importance of consumer orientation. Put
differently, journalists who saw value in audience analytics also saw their job as primar-
ily giving audiences what they want—perhaps in contrast to what journalists think
audiences need.

Behaviors
The impact of audience analytics and metrics on editorial practices and routines
has received substantial scholarly attention. Scholars have found varying amounts of
access to analytics and exposure to metrics among journalists (Bunce 2015; Hanusch
2017; MacGregor 2007; Usher 2013) though they are widespread at higher levels
(Cherubini and Nielsen 2016).
There is mixed evidence regarding the use of analytics and metrics to plan cover-
age, distribute content, and evaluate employee performance (Anderson 2011b; Bunce
2017; Ferrer-Conill 2017; Lee and Tandoc 2017; Lowrey and Woo 2010; Usher 2013). For
example, Cherubini and Nielsen (2016) found that audience metrics rarely inform edito-
rial decision-making beyond limited, short-term, day-to-day optimizations. In contrast,
Anderson (2011b, 561) found that “website traffic often appeared to be the primary
ingredient in Philly.com news judgment.” Recent scholarship has thus sought to identify
the key contextual factors, mostly at the organizational and individual levels, that might
explain how and how much audience analytics and metrics are used.
At the organizational level, market orientation appears to be especially important,
with market-oriented organizations making greater use of analytics (Ferrer-Conill 2017;
Hanusch 2017; Lowrey and Woo 2010; Petre 2015). Publicly traded organizations tend
to engage in greater monitoring of audience preferences, though the impact of organi-
zational size is mixed (Lowrey and Woo 2010; McKenzie et al. 2011; Vu 2014). Organiza-
tions that perceive greater competition or view audiences as a source of symbolic
capital are also more likely to use analytics (Lowrey and Woo 2010; Tandoc 2015; cf.
McKenzie et al. 2011). Those that employ tight coupling are more likely to monitor met-
rics than those that are loosely coupled (Lowrey and Woo 2010). Scholars have also
observed some intraorganizational variance in terms of the distribution platform in
question and the time of day (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016; Hanusch 2017).
At the individual level, Tandoc and Ferrucci (2017) found that journalists’ attitudes
toward using audience feedback, their perception of organizational policy on the use
of audience feedback, and their perception of the knowledge and skills they possess
vis-à-vis audience analytics impacted their behavioral intention to use audience analyt-
ics. That, in turn, impacted their self-reported use of analytics to decide which stories
to cover and do follow-ups on, how to cover those stories, and which topic areas to
increase coverage in. Notably, perceptions of how widespread the use of audience ana-
lytics is in the industry did not impact behavioral intention. Additionally, higher
amounts of journalism training tend to produce lower use of audience analytics, and
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 427

perceived economic benefits increase the likelihood of making editorial changes based
on audience information (Vu 2014). A newsworker’s position in the editorial hierarchy
may also play an important role (Hanusch 2017).
A crucial set of variables spanning both levels involves managerial priorities and
editors’ intervention. Bunce’s (2017) ethnographic study of Reuters’ East Africa bureau
found that managers began paying close attention to metrics and issued directives and
praise based on them. Despite their reservations, most journalists responded by looking
to metrics for guidance since they wanted job security amid an uncertain environment
(see also Groves and Brown 2011; Usher 2012). In contrast, Usher (2013) observed that
although top managers at Al Jazeera English had access to sophisticated metrics, they
promoted a culture of not deferring news judgment to audience metrics, and few jour-
nalists consequently factored metrics into their decision-making (see also Petre 2015).
These studies underscore that social contexts matter a great deal for how—and how
much—a technology (e.g. audience analytics) is used (Orlikowski 2000; Pinch and Bijker
1984).

Content
Scholars often anticipate that observed and self-reported changes in newswork-
ers’ behaviors will impact the content they produce. Newsworkers have self-reported
using metrics to optimize story content for search engines (Bunce 2015; Groves and
Brown 2011), real-time split test (A/B) pictures and headlines (Cherubini and Nielsen
2016), and promote or deselect content on the homepage (Anderson 2011b; Tandoc
2015).
However, there is relatively little scholarship employing content analysis to assess
the nature of changes to content. This is a significant shortcoming because self-reports
can suffer from a range of biases and misperceptions of how behavioral intentions end
up impacting content (Lowrey and Woo 2010; Vu 2014; Welbers et al. 2016). Scholars
have argued that the paucity of content-focused studies can be attributed to their
methodological challenges (Lee, Lewis, and Powers 2014; Zamith 2017a, 2017b).
The majority of content-analytic work has focused on short-term impacts on story
placement on the homepage. Lee, Lewis, and Powers (2014) found that a story’s popu-
larity had a small effect on its subsequent placement on an organization’s homepage,
and that there was a stronger effect of story popularity on placement than of place-
ment on popularity. Bright and Nicholls (2014) found that articles appearing on a most-
read list had a lower risk of being removed from the homepage than articles that did
not; that this effect occurred, with little difference for both “soft” (e.g. entertainment)
and “hard” (e.g. politics) news; and that the effect was stronger for quality publications
than the tabloid ones. Zamith (2016) found similar results for lagged placement and
de-selection across a larger array of news organizations. In contrast to that prior work,
Zamith argued that the small magnitude of the effects suggested a story’s popularity
had limited practical impact on those editorial practices.
More recently, scholars have explored the impact of metrics on the likelihood of
follow-up reporting. Welbers and colleagues’ (2016) analysis of Dutch newspapers
found that articles appearing on the most-viewed list were more likely to receive atten-
tion in subsequent reporting, both in the print version and website. By pairing their
428 R. ZAMITH

content analysis with interviews, they also found that journalists appeared to underre-
port the extent of the influence of metrics on coverage decisions.
A stream of work by Boczkowski and colleagues (Boczkowski and Mitchelstein
2013; Boczkowski, Mitchelstein, and Walter 2011; Boczkowski and Peer 2011) found a
“sizable” gap between journalists’ choices and consumers’ choices across multiple orga-
nizations and countries, with journalists selecting public affairs news content more
often than audiences. Zamith (2016) found a similar gap still exists among large news
organizations in the United States, with just one third of editorially prominent news
items ever appearing on the most-viewed list for the average organization. When it
comes to marquee content, it appears a shift toward a metrics-driven culture remains
unrealized and that an economic inefficiency—or, perhaps, uncertainty about audience
demand—still exists (see Meyer, Tsui, and Hinings 1993; Wildman 2006).

Discourse and Ethics

A number of scholars have explored the rhetorical shifts that have accompanied
the proliferation of audience analytics and metrics. The term “audience” has been rede-
fined and reimagined, and its relationship to journalists reconsidered. Anderson (2011b)
observed through an ethnography of newsrooms in Philadelphia and New Jersey that
online audiences were increasingly rhetorically valorized as “partners,” active and with
needs and desires that could be quantified through analytics and acted upon. This view
of “generative” audiences (Anderson 2011b, 551) marks a significant departure from
journalists’ prior distance from and disinterest in those who consumed their work (see
Gans 1979). Today, “many journalists also want analytics” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016,
7) to better serve their audiences.
The impact of audience metrics on the notion of “success” has received consider-
able scholarly attention. Bunce (2017) observed that managers at Reuters’ East Africa
bureau publicly praised and censured journalists based on readership rates. Interviews
with journalists led Tandoc (2014, 11) to conclude that “traffic is also equated with a
job well done.” Despite the early emphasis on page views (Anderson 2011b; Graves
and Kelly 2010; Groves and Brown 2011), newsrooms are increasingly finding that there
is “no ‘God metric’ for journalism” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016, 34) and that multiple
metrics should complement one another.
Scholarly concerns over the ethical uses and misuses of audience analytics and
metrics have evolved in similar fashion. Scholars were quick to express concerns about
a “culture of the click” (Anderson 2011b, 555) that might drive “a new race to the bot-
tom” by catering to the lowest common denominator of all tastes and eschewing
“hard” news (Nguyen 2013, 152). Turow (2005) cautioned against letting the rhetoric of
“empowerment” justify unreflexive uses of audience data and treating audiences strictly
as markets. Tandoc and Thomas (2015, 244) similarly warned of “the danger of viewing
the audience as disaggregated segments based on consumer preference—a view that
is inconsistent with the communitarian function of helping pursue the common good.”
Recent scholarship has moved away from that “paternalistic model of journalism”
(Tandoc and Thomas 2015, 252). Hindman (2017), for example, argues that organiza-
tions can use analytics to better understand what audiences want and how they find
and interact with content. They can then combine those insights with editorial
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 429

judgments that are consistent with the organization’s mission in order to better serve
those audiences with civically valuable content (see also Cherubini and Nielsen 2016).
Notably, Hindman contends that “journalists now have a positive obligation to use these
new audience measurement tools” (p. 192). Nevertheless, the potential to use audience
metrics and data-driven motivation as exploitative tools remains a concern (see Ferrer-
Conill 2017). In short, these changing discourses and ethical prescriptions highlight the
changing professional nature of journalism as it de-professionalizes in some ways and
re-professionalizes in others (see Meyers and Davidson 2016).

Discussion and Research Directions

While many scholars and practitioners were initially pessimistic about the prolifer-
ation of audience analytics and audience metrics and their impact on journalism (e.g.
Anderson 2011b; MacGregor 2007), there seems to be a shift toward greater optimism
(e.g. Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). Over time, scholars appear to be observing more
nuanced, if not restrained, attitudes, behaviors, and impacts on content, leading to pre-
sumptions of effects that are more limited than originally anticipated (e.g. Petre 2015;
Zamith 2016). That nuance is also leading to new discourses and ethical recommenda-
tions that emphasize audience analytics and metrics as complementary tools that can
be used to advance traditional journalistic values (e.g. Hindman 2017). This shift is by
no means universal; some newsworkers still actively resist metrics and some scholars
continue to have well-founded concerns. Furthermore, audience analytics clearly seem
to have at least some impact on all stages of news production, and the proliferation of
metrics necessitates revisiting foundational theories of news production like gatekeep-
ing (Wallace 2017) and raises broader questions about professionalism (Meyers and
Davidson 2016).
The general shift in the literature and practice may be explained in part by the
fact that the proliferation of audience analytics (and the scholarship on it) began
against the backdrop of deep uncertainty in the profession as a result of a global eco-
nomic recession and massive job losses, rapidly changing consumption patterns, and
structural changes to organizations and the broader news ecosystem that accelerated
over the past two decades (see Lowrey and Gade 2011). There is greater stability today.
Moreover, that shift may also be explained by the normalization of the technology and
more nuanced understandings of the affordances of analytics and the limitations of
metrics, which may be juxtaposed against other social changes within journalistic
spaces. There is growing acceptance that multiple metrics should be employed to
achieve different objectives and recognition of the negative long-term implications
“chasing clicks” might have for brands that are finding increasing success with digital
subscriptions (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016). The initial fears and pessimism were not
unfounded; practices simply evolved to better reflect the values—some changing and
others proving resilient—that guide newswork. In short, one must look beyond technol-
ogy and be mindful of the social, historical, and economic contexts around audience
analytics and metrics to understand this latest wave in quantifying news audiences.
While the considerable amount of recent scholarship on audience analytics and
metrics has clarified their emerging roles in news production, a number of important
questions remain unanswered. Scholars have aptly contended that the use of audience
430 R. ZAMITH

analytics has altered journalists’ constructions of their audiences (see Anderson 2011a;
Lee and Tandoc 2017) but it remains unclear exactly what about those constructions
has changed. For example, do journalists who make extensive use of audience analytics
view their audiences as being more or less intelligent, participatory, rational, reasonable,
or thoughtful? How might such constructions impact journalists’ desire to engage with
or serve their audiences? Scholarship that measures particular attitudes toward audi-
ences and relates them to specific uses of audience analytics would further the under-
standing of how audiences are being reimagined through new information systems.
Additionally, while Hanusch (2017) provides an important contribution, more generaliz-
able work evaluating the relationship between audience analytics and institutional
roles, epistemologies, and ethical ideologies would surely contribute to the understand-
ing of the question: What impacts are analytics having on journalistic cultures?
While scholars have identified a range of factors that may impact the use of audi-
ence analytics and metrics in news production, few of those factors have been system-
atically evaluated, if investigated at all. More comprehensive models need to be
employed to answer the question: What explains the differences in the use of audience
analytics and metrics across actors and organizations and toward particular practices?
The work by Tandoc and colleagues (e.g. Tandoc 2015; Tandoc and Ferrucci 2017)
serves as a good starting point upon which scholars can build. Factors like public own-
ership and organizational size were found to be predictive in early work (Lowrey and
Woo 2010; McKenzie et al. 2011) and it is worth revisiting them at this more mature
stage of technological adoption. Additionally, qualitative evidence suggests that organi-
zational type, platform-parting, and one’s position in an editorial hierarchy are variables
that should be included in future models (see Hanusch 2017). Recognizing that there is
no one “God metric” (Cherubini and Nielsen 2016), scholars should move beyond gen-
eralized references to “analytics” and “metrics” and utilize specific systems and mea-
sures as predictor and outcome variables in their assessments of journalistic practices.
Beyond quantitative modeling, scholars should build on Bunce’s (2017) work to explore
the question: How are social arrangements and the allocation of capital within news-
rooms and the broader field of journalism changing as a result of this quantitative
turn?
With regard to news content, a critical question remains only partly addressed:
How are observed and self-reported behaviors impacting the content citizens consume?
While the work of Bright and Nicholls (2014), Lee and colleagues (2014), and Zamith
(2016) offer useful starting points, additional work is sorely needed. Notably, organiza-
tions’ homepages are becoming less important due to changes in news consumption
patterns. This raises the question: How are metrics impacting the presentation of con-
tent via news and chat apps? How do they impact the promotion of content by organi-
zations on social media? Scholars should also move beyond presentation and assess
longer-term impacts on news content and story selection, as Welbers et al. (2016) have
done. In doing so, scholars should incorporate predictors and control variables that
have been found to impact news selection in the general body of literature (e.g. story
type, deviance, and relevance). Perhaps most importantly, scholars should work with
news organizations to gain access to their analytics platforms. This would allow
researchers to work with other metrics that are rhetorically valorized (e.g. time spent
on page) and avoid the many limitations of a website’s list of most-viewed items (see
Zamith 2017b).
 QUANTIFIED AUDIENCES IN NEWS PRODUCTION 431

While scholars have begun to embrace more nuanced views at the intersection of
audience analytics and ethics, much remains undone with the normative question of:
What do ethical uses of audience analytics and metrics look like? Cherubini and Nielsen
(2016) and Hindman (2017) have begun addressing that question, though additional
perspectives employing competing ethical frameworks are needed. It remains unclear
how journalists come to learn about “appropriate” uses of audience analytics and met-
rics, and such work could serve as a guidepost. Additionally, this article has focused on
the impact on news production by humans. There are emerging bodies of literature on
computational journalism and automated journalism, which are powered at least in part
by audience analytics (see Anderson 2011a). We are likely to see more news organiza-
tions either license or develop algorithms that can identify audience information wants,
quickly generate stories using templates, and automatically distribute them across plat-
forms—either en mass or in a personalized fashion. This raises the question: What
moral obligations are owed to citizens by the creators of those algorithms and the
news organizations that employ them? Building on Hindman’s (2017) contention, do
journalists also have a positive obligation to use such algorithms?
Finally, the majority of scholarship has focused on the United States and western
Europe. It is unclear how those findings translate to the rest of the Americas or Asia.
There is also only limited evidence from Africa and Oceania. Scholars are thus strongly
encouraged to go beyond the dominant contexts.

Conclusion
It is apparent from the scholarship that audience analytics and metrics are playing
notable roles in contemporary journalism, but the affordances they enable must be
understood within social, historical, and economic contexts. By doing so, it becomes
evident that the quantification of journalistic audiences is not new, though we are wit-
nessing a new wave toward the rationalization of audience understanding that empha-
sizes a hereto unprecedented level of quantification in constructing audiences. After an
initial period of skepticism, metrics are now factored to some extent into journalistic
attitudes, behaviors, content, discourses, and ethics—and increasingly willingly so.
While the evidence does not appear to support the proposition that contempo-
rary journalism is being driven by quantified audiences, it is clear that both audiences
and quantification are playing more prominent roles in the news production process
than in the past. One may surmise that these new tools and measurements are being
slowly normalized into existing routines and practices, and helping new ones emerge,
and to some extent reorienting professional values and boundaries. However, while we
have learned a great deal over the past decade about the emerging role of audience
analytics and metrics in news production, there is much yet to explore and explain.

DISCLOSURE STATEMENT
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
432 R. ZAMITH

NOTE
1. One may also reasonably view audience analytics as the process for engaging in
those tasks. This view highlights the social dynamics involved in the process of
using the systems and evaluating its outputs (i.e. audience metrics) to make sense
of phenomena. This view also distinguishes between analytics and metrics.

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Rodrigo Zamith, Journalism Department, University of Massachusetts Amherst,

USA. E-mail: rzamith@umass.edu. Web: http://www.rodrigozamith.com.